Contents
- John King’s Diary
- Georgiana McCrae’s Diary
- John Pascoe Fawkner’s Diary
- Simon Wonga’s Diary
- Convict’s Diary
John King’s Diary
John King (1841-1872) was an Irish soldier who became famous for being an explorer. He was born in Ireland in 1841. He went to school Dublin and then joined the army at the age of 14.
As a solider, King was sent to India and stationed in the North. He worked as an assistant teacher. He suffered a severe illness and spent sixteen months recovering. While he was recovering he met a man who had been sent to India by the Victorian Government to purchase 24 camels to be used for exploration of the Australian desert.
King decided to leave the army and help to supervise the people who were in charge of the camels. King sailed for Melbourne in 1860.
King joined the Burke and Wills expedition.
King was the only person from the expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria who lived. He survived with the help of the Yandruwandha people, with whom he lived for two and a half months. Then he was rescued.
Expedition – What happened to John King
The Burke and Wills expedition, officially called the Victorian Exploring Expedition,
was the largest and best equipped in Australian history. Led by Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, they crossed Australia from south to north.
The group left Melbourne on the 20th of August 1860.
Early in October they reached Menindee and King was put in charge of the camels. He was also chosen to be part of the group that would head to Cooper’s Creek first. They reached Coopers Creek on 11 November and set up camp.
The group split again; Robert Burke, William Wills, John King and Charley Gray, a sailor, raced ahead to the Gulf of Carpentaria, 1207 km away, while the rest of the group was left and expected to wait for more supplies.
They reached the Gulf of Carpentaria on the 9th of February 1861.
They reached the Gulf of Carpentaria on the 9th of February 1861.
On their return to Coopers Creek, disaster struck. They lost their only horse and four of
the six camels. They also ran low in rations.
On 17 April Gray died. Four days later the three exhausted men made a superhuman
effort and in one day covered the remaining 48 km, arriving back at Coopers Creek.
The only human sign was the word DIG carved on a tree. They dug and found a box of rations and a message from the man they had left there saying that the supplies never arrived and that he had decided that very morning to leave with his men.
King’s surviving camels were too weak to go on. Burke decided to make for Mount Hopeless, 241 km away, and after two days rest they set out. For two months they struggled through dangerous and difficult country, with their food running out, and growing weaker every day. Late in June Burke and Wills died, but incredibly
King survived, kept alive by the kindness of the Yandruwandha people until a rescue expedition found him.
King was taken back to Melbourne and given a public welcome. He never recovered from the expedition and died of tuberculosis on 15 January 1872 at his home in St Kilda.
Georgiana McCrae’s Diary
The family first lived in a wooden house in Bourke Street. In February 1842 they moved to Mayfield, on the Yarra River (near Studley Park), designed by her and described as ‘one of the first superior houses erected in the Colony’. In 1843 Andrew took up the Arthur’s Seat run near Dromana, and there built a house in which the family lived from 1845 to 1851. Probably because of the turmoil arising from the gold discoveries, Andrew abandoned squatting to become police magistrate at Alberton (Gippsland), then at Barrow’s Inn, Hepburn, Creswick, and finally for seventeen years at Kilmore, where he was also warden for the goldfields, deputy-sheriff and commissioner of crown lands. He retired in 1866 and died in 1874. Georgiana did not accompany him in all these moves but lived with her children in Melbourne. She died on 24 May 1890 at Hawthorn. Of her seven surviving children, the eldest, George Gordon, was a writer and the friend of writers, and the youngest son, Farquhar Peregrine, became inspector of the Bank of Australasia.
It was said that her skill in managing the Aboriginals at Arthur’s Seat was acknowledged by other runholders; she was as useful as a drover among cattle and horses, and was renowned as a ‘medicine woman’. Mayfield and the homestead at Arthur’s Seat were resorted to by people with literary and artistic leanings, and her visitors included Bishop William Grant Broughton, William Charles Wentworth, Benjamin Boyd,’Orion’ Horne, Henry Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Richard Birnie, Sir Oswald Brierly,Nicholas Chevalier, and Sir John Franklin. She was a close friend of Lieutenant-GovernorCharles La Trobe and his wife.
According to an obituary by Alexander Sutherland, ‘It was largely due to the influence of such women as Mrs McCrae that ideas of refinement and principles of taste were kept alive during the “dark ages” of our colonial history’.
John Pascoe Fawkner’s Diary
Early Life
John Pascoe Fawkner (1792-1869), pioneer, was born on 20 October 1792 at Cripplegate, London, the son of John Fawkner, a metal refiner, and Hannah, née Pascoe. His father was convicted of receiving stolen goods and in 1801 was sentenced to fourteen years transportation. With his mother and younger sister, Elizabeth, John accompanied his father to the new settlement to be formed in Bass Strait. They joined H.M.S. Calcutta at Portsmouth and sailed on 29 April 1803 in company with the Ocean, carrying a number of free settlers and stores.
Life in Tasmania
However, by 1806 the family held a 50-acre (20 ha) land grant some seven miles (11 km) from Hobart Town, and John, as the shepherd boy, often lived alone for weeks at a time in a sod hut while his sister kept house for their father in the town.
In the company of Eliza Cobb, Fawkner moved to Launceston to begin afresh as a builder and sawyer. They were married on 5 December 1822. Although he claimed in later years that he had chosen his wife from an immigrant ship, Eliza actually arrived late in 1818, aged 17, as a convict whose crime was stealing a baby. Beside building, Fawkner also followed his old trade of baker. Fawkner possessed, as James Bonwick stated, ‘a native energy that made him rise superior to all assaults, endure all sneers, quail at no difficulty, and that thrust him ever foremost in the strife, happy in the war of words and the clash of tongues’. He had engaged in a strenuous programme of self-education and to his many activities he added that of ‘bush lawyer’ appearing in the lower courts for a minimum fee of 6s. He also managed a horticultural nursery and conducted a coaching service, independent in both name and nature, between Launceston and Longford. In 1828 he started the Launceston Advertiser, acting as editor for two years, and using the paper as ‘the active and avowed friend of the emancipist class in Van Diemen’s Land, dealing heavy and repeated blows upon officialdom and the reputed respectable class in the island’. He attacked capital punishment in a colony that valued ‘a man’s life at less than a sheep’, and made forceful remarks on cruelty to assigned servants.
Moving to Melbourne
Having visited Western Port, the expedition agreed to try Port Phillip Bay, and the Enterpriseanchored in the southern part of the bay on Sunday, 16 August 1835. Fawkner himself landed at Hobson’s Bay in October 1835 and at once began to lay the foundations of a fortune that grew to £20,000 in his first four years on the mainland. In January 1838 he added to his trade of hotel-keeping that of newspaper proprietor. His Melbourne Advertiser was handwritten on four pages of foolscap for nine numbers until a press and type arrived from Tasmania, and it was then printed weekly until suppressed because Fawkner had no licence. In February 1839, with a licence, he began the Port Phillip Patriot and Melbourne Advertiser; this later became a daily, and he ran it in conjunction with a bookselling and stationery business. In 1839 Fawkner also added to his already considerable land holdings a 780-acre (316 ha) property known as Pascoe Vale.
Business interests
Because of a complex of causes, including land and livestock speculation, a crazy financial structure with bank loans on little security, and a three-year drought, prices plummeted and land revenue fell by three-quarters in 1842. Although not a speculator himself, Fawkner was forced to sell many of his properties in an attempt to weather the worst of the depression. A fortunate and substantial settlement in favour of his wife enabled him to retain a large portion of the Pascoe Vale estate, and by signing over the Patriot to his father he kept control of the newspaper. His financial affairs were further complicated by his part in guaranteeing a bond of W. Rucker to the Union Bank for £10,000. Fawkner was declared insolvent and filed his schedule in March 1845, listing liabilities of £8898 and assets of £3184. He claimed at the time to have been stripped of £12,000 in cash and ten houses, but such was his soundness that within a year he had not only paid his debts in full but had £1000 to his bank credit.
A leading figure in Melbourne
As a man of property and influence, Fawkner took an active and leading part in the political and social struggles of the time. First, as one of seven market commissioners and, when this work was taken over by the municipality, as a councillor, Fawkner held office for many years. He represented Talbot in the first Legislative Council in 1851, and on the introduction of responsible government was returned for the Central Province of Victoria holding the seat until his death. During his eighteen years in the Legislative Council Fawkner spoke regularly and often (one member said he made the same speech for fifteen years) on all matters before the House, but was best known for his ‘monomania’ on squatters and the disposal of land. Markedly liberal in his views, Fawkner considered that squatters had obtained their rights by a system of robbery and that parliament enacted class legislation aimed at protecting the 700 privileged sheep-farmers in Victoria and grinding ‘the bulk of the people to the very dust’. Fawkner was referred to as ‘the tribune of the people’ and was perhaps the best, and certainly the most out-spoken, advocate of a strong class of yeomen farmers. One of his published pamphlets, printed in 1854, was Squatting Orders … Orders in Council … Locking Up the Lands of the Colony in the Hands of a Small Minority, Giving Them, Without Any Real Reason, the Right to Buy the Whole or Any Part of the Sixty Million Acres of This Fine Colony, at Their Own Price …
After the opening of the goldfields of Victoria in 1851, Fawkner devoted much of his time to the legislative aspects of gold-mining problems. He sat on some ninety-six select committees between 1852 and 1869, the most far-reaching in its effect being the Commission of Inquiry into the goldfields in 1854-55. He was alarmed by the Chinese and American immigrants, and saw both groups as potential sources of disorder. The presence of the Chinese might lead to civil war, he considered; he would have liked to expel them all. In September 1855 he wrote of ‘wild Americans—who know no law but the Bowie Knife, the Rifle or Lynch practice’.
Old Age
With advancing years Fawkner’s health declined but he continued to attend every session, wearing always a velvet smoking cap and wrapped in an old-fashioned cloak. He had grown to be regarded as an institution, and became more conservative in his views. In his last parliamentary sessions he opposed manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, and payment for members, yet retained very advanced notions on the rights of married women and deserted wives, and the divorce laws. Though cantankerous and dogmatic, he was a selfless patriot, honest and, in his way, idealistic. His last words to parliament declared his faith: ‘I believe the Colony requires new blood, and that, unless we get more working men here, the work of improvement must stand still, if it does not retrograde’.
In his middle years he had been spoken of as ‘half-froth, half-venom’, and in many ways was not a very pleasant character, but behind his almost violent aggressiveness lay the pursuit of worthy motives, and a freedom from immorality and corruption that was sufficiently rare in that generation to inspire the confidence of his less fortunate fellows. His triumph over heredity and early experiences and his struggles with autocracy, convictism and corruption, demonstrated the strength of his purpose, and his rehabilitation and later career were remarkable. Fawkner died on 4 September 1869 at his home in Smith Street, Collingwood, the grand old man of contemporary Victoria.
Simon Wonga’s Diary
Simon Wonga was born near Healesville in the 1820s. His father, Billibellary, was a respected leader and one of the ‘chiefs’ of the Wurundjeri who met John Batman in 1835. When Wonga was in his mid-teens, he severely injured his foot while he was hunting and was cared for by William Thomas, Assistant Aboriginal Protector. Wonga soon befriended Thomas and his son, and even began calling Thomas marminarta, meaning ‘father’.
Wonga shared much of his understanding of traditional culture, language and beliefs with Thomas. He also learnt from Thomas how European society worked – information that would help him to develop into the skilled and respected negotiator he became in later life.
By 1851 Wonga had become ngurungaeta or headman of the Wurundjeri people.
Wonga was also one of the first Indigenous leaders to try and regain the land settlers had taken. In 1859, Wonga took a small group of Taungurong men from the Goulburn River to see William Thomas, acting as their interpreter and mediator. In a letter to Redmond Barry, Thomas quotes Wonga:
I bring my friends Goulburn Blacks, they want a block of land in their country where they may sit down plant corn potatoes etc etc, and work like white man. – Simon Wonga
After this meeting, a deputation was sent to the Commissioner of the Land and Survey Office where they met with officials and secured a portion of land for the Taungurong. A precedent had been set, and in 1860, Wonga returned to Thomas to ask for a piece of land for his own Wurundjeri people. The land he asked for later became the Coranderrk Aboriginal Mission. Wonga died there in 1875.
Convict’s Diary
Convict Life
A convict’s life was not easy or pleasant. The work was hard, accommodation rough and the food poor. Nevertheless, the sense of community offered some comfort when convicts met up with their mates from the hulks back home, or others who had been transported on the same ship.
Convict Work
Male convicts were brought ashore a day or so after their ships landed. They were marched up to the Government Lumber Yard, where they were washed, inspected and had their vital statistics recorded – height, weight etc.
If convicts were skilled, for example carpenters, blacksmiths or stonemasons, they may have been employed on the government works programme. Otherwise they were sent off to do labouring work or given over to property owners, merchant or farmers who may once have been convicts themselves.
Convict Diet
A convict’s daily rations were very simple. Typically, they would consist of:
Breakfast: A roll and a bowl of ‘skilly’ – a porridge-like dish made from oatmeal, water, and if they were lucky, scrapings meat.
Lunch: A large bread roll and a pound of dried, salted meat.
Dinner: One bread roll and, if they were lucky, a cup of tea.
Convict Clothing
Until 1810 convicts were permitted to wear ordinary civilian clothes in Australia. The new Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, wanted to set the convicts apart from the new free settlers who were coming to Australia.
The distinctive new uniform marked out the convicts very clearly. The trousers were marked with the letters PB, for Prison Barracks. They were buttoned down the sides of the legs, which meant they could be removed over a pair of leg irons.
Convict Class System
A class system evolved in the convict community. The native born children of convict couples were known as ‘currency’, but the children of officials were known as ‘sterling’.
A wealthy class of former convicts (Emancipists) sprung up when the Governor began to put reformed convicts back into society. These former convicts, were very much hated by the soldiers and free-settlers who had come to Australia of their own free will.
Convict Housing
For those convicts who remained in Sydney, lodgings were available in a neighbourhood called The Rocks. It was a fairly free community with few restrictions on daily life. Here, husbands and wives could be assigned to each other and some businesses were even opened by convicts still under sentence.
The Rocks became notorious for drunkenness, filth and thieving, and in 1819 Governor MacQuarie built Hyde Park Barracks, which afforded greater security.
Those sent to work in other towns or in the bush were often given food and lodging by their employer. The road projects and penal colonies offered far less comfortable accommodation, often with 20 sweaty bodies crammed into a small hut.
Convict Women
Women made up 15% of the convict population. Female convicts were mostly young, single women who had been domestic servants and/or who had come from a semi-skilled background – such as an apprenticeship. The majority of female convicts were first time offenders sentenced to transportation for minor theft.
Until they were assigned work, women were taken to the Female Factories, where they performed menial tasks like making or washing clothes, mending and needlework. It was also the place where women were sent as a punishment for misbehaving. Conditions in these factories were miserable. In the Parramatta female factory the occupants were not given blankets or mattresses to sleep on.
Convict women were often sent to work in domestic service (being a maid), washing clothes and working on government farms, and were expected to find their own food and lodging.
If they broke any rules they were punished harshly. Some were made to wear an iron collar fastened round the neck, or having their heads shaved.
Many female convicts were forced to get marry to free settlers.
AusQuest 